Anna signed up with us during her worst month in about a year. Around 7K. Coaches quitting, clients not sticking, the whole thing falling apart, her words were complete chaos.
Not long after, she’s almost at 30K for the month, and every dollar of it is new revenue. No recurring. She told the story to George, one of our coaches, and I wanted to go through it because what fixed her business is not what most coaches would guess.
She wasn’t broke, she was stuck
So Anna runs an online coaching business. She’s in California right now but she travels a ton and has lived all over the world. The business was working, kind of. She’d make some progress, have a couple good months, then couldn’t keep the clients. She had assistant coaches but struggled to manage them, and some months she didn’t even have enough clients to keep an assistant coach on the roster.
She listed it out on the call. Lead gen, management, holding the team together. Then the 7K month hit and she said that’s always her signal. When things start sliding, that’s when she goes and gets help.
I actually like that about her. A lot of people do the opposite. Things go bad and they go quiet and try to grind it out alone for another year. She saw the number drop and moved.
Her setup was too complicated to grow
This was the big one. Anna said the first breakthrough was seeing how unscalable everything was. Lead gen, management, how the product got delivered, all of it. Way too complex. Nothing she could teach an assistant coach, and nothing that could handle a bunch of new clients at once.
And she said something I thought was pretty self aware. She loved all the detail stuff, but she figured out it was kind of a selfish thing. The business needed it to be easy for clients and easy to grow, not fun for her.
I see this constantly with coaches. They build this beautiful custom thing for every client and then wonder why they can’t hire anyone to do it. If you’re the only one who can deliver it, you can’t take a day off, let alone grow. Just make it simpler.
Rebuilding before the revenue showed up
They moved everything over to Elite 360, which she admitted was a lot. She said she was overwhelmed and kind of scared, and she apologized to George for going off at him every week lol. Totally normal. When you’ve been doing something one way for a long time, changing it feels worse than leaving it broken.
But once it was migrated, she said it started supporting the growth. They could handle more clients, write SOPs, and keep delivery basically the same for each person. That’s what lets you hand it to assistant coaches.
And this part matters. She said a lot of their early time wasn’t on revenue at all. It was rebuilding. George compared it to a building getting knocked down to rubble and then built back up properly. If you’re expecting the money to jump in week two while you’re tearing everything apart, you’re going to quit too early. The payoff came after the foundation was done.
Setters that actually perform
Anna had setters before. She said they just weren’t performing. She gave a shout out to the Elite Closers team for setter training and helping her structure and manage a sales team, and getting quality people on it.
Here’s what got me. The almost 30K month was the first month with the new setter from Elite Closers. And it was the most new clients they’d ever sold in one month. Her next thought was basically, imagine if we had two of them. Imagine if we had a closer too.
That’s exactly how you should think about it. One setter brought her to almost 30K in new sales. Okay, what does the second one do? Obviously it’s not perfectly linear, but that’s the math you run.
Raising prices was part of it
She called out increasing her prices as one of the things that made the month happen. She didn’t give the numbers on the call, so I won’t make any up. But think about it. Lower prices mean you need way more clients to hit the same number, and more clients means more coaches, more management, more of the exact chaos she was drowning in.
It’s actually harder to sell low priced stuff and make enough money to pay the bills. What I’d do is charge more and take on fewer people so you can actually deliver for them. It’s always easy to go down, it’s just harder to go up, so go up.
What she told people on the fence
George asked what she’d tell someone on the fence. She said she’s been through a few mentorships and she loves investing in herself, way more than buying stuff that makes you feel good for a day. She also said she’s grown as a leader through this.
The thing she pointed to was proof. She said she can see us actually do it inside our own business, how we have coaches, how we scale, the systems. Some mentorships she’d done before could teach her up to where they were at, and then it was like, okay, where do I go from here? She wanted to see it work at the level she’s aiming for in a few years.
She also said for her it’s about not being alone in it. She’s a go getter, but when something doesn’t go right she questions everything. Having people there to walk her through those moments gave her peace of mind.
What I’d take from Anna’s story
If your coaching business keeps hitting the same wall, look at how complicated it is before you look at your ads. Simplify the delivery so someone else can do it. Get a setter who actually performs. Charge enough that you’re not drowning in clients to make the number.
She said it best herself. They’ve only built the foundation, and now there’s a whole building to put on top of it. That’s where she’s going. Simple as that.
Want to know what’s capping your business right now? Take my free 90 Day Ceiling Plan. Answer 18 questions and get a written plan, built on your own numbers, that names the one thing holding you back and what to fix first.
